Our World

fugitive caught after 30 years of living on a dead mans ID

Dollie Walton's children always found Thomas Fry, the man who had lived with her for nearly thirty years, to be a bit strange, but Thomas Fry's secret life unraveled when the U.S. Marshals arrested him in Nashville at his home for escaping from a Michigan psychiatric facility in 1976. He is actually 76-year-old Thomas Ball, convicted in 1964 of fatally stabbing thirty four year-old Barbara Jean Eden, whose body was found at the Strand Hotel in Detroit on September 3, 1963. "He's always been an evasive person. He said he couldn't remember his Social Security number," Walton said. He served 12 years on a twenty to fourty year sentence at the southern Michigan Correctional Facilitly, then transferred for treatment in 1976 to the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Michigan, from which he escaped. He spent the next 30 years hiding in Tennessee by stealing the identity of a dead man, posing as a married man, and using Dollie Walton to help him get jobs. "He didn't care about how you spelled his last name. He didn't collect disability and he refused to go to the doctor even though he had stomach problems," Roach said. "although some in the family had suspicions about Ball, she doesn't think her mother knew he was a fugitive."

posted by Anonymous @ 9/20/2006 10:52:00 PM